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(8)Garrus Vakarian vs (9)Ramza Beoulve 2018
Ulti's Analysis "I want Final Fantasy characters to be my pallbearers so they can let me down one last time." On the bright side, heeeeeey, our first contest match that was an actual match! Some of the best matches you'll ever see are when a match with zero debate is unexpectedly close, and most of us just picked Garrus without thinking. After all, Square has looked like a Victorian slum for years and Garrus is someone we all love no matter what Mass Effect looks like. There's also the fact Ramza has never won anything and is from a game that hasn't been relevant in 20 years. Don't even try telling me that garbage PSP port matters, either. The bonus content was cool. Bastardizing the script and that unreal animation lag made the game damn near unplayable without an outside patch, and outside patches do not affect a game's score for me. It's why Warcraft 3 will forever be 0/10 bile regardless of how much I love Dota. When this match started and they were even, we were shocked. Then Ramza was up 28 at the freeze and it was a lot of "uh oh". Then Garrus evened things up and we all figured there was a weird early bracket vote or something. Nope. Ramza spent the next few hours slightly ahead and trying to shake Garrus off like a bad case of fleas. Garrus held his own here, but when things settled down and we entered the dead zone of the night vote, He hit 200 at midnight and it looked like he was going to pull away for the win. After all, Square's night vote is still one trend that holds true with our new start time. As luck would have it, Ramza was only able to quickly get his lead up to 256 overnight, and it was Garrus, not Ramza, that won the night vote. Garrus kept chipping away at the ol' vote lead brick, and after a tie in the morning, the brick broke and favored Garrus pretty easily. Garrus won the morning vote rather convincingly and ended this match, but with the match over there was still one thing left to root for in this one. You all know what it is, because the stats topic goes insane about it any time there's a close match: http://www.gamefaqscontests.com/drupal/node/22?matchnum=1730&num=2 Could Ramza keep Garrus under a 460 vote lead? That was all anyone cared about. And as luck would have it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S53fZTbKHG0 A record that stood for 14 years was broken in this contest. The new one was 419 votes, at least for character battles. DKC2 vs Xenoblade is the true record at 290. 12 hour polls do not count and don't try telling me they do. Either way, whether you consider 419 or 290 the true record, both would get broken multiple times this contest thanks to our fossilized vote totals. I want to be proud of close matches, but when polls used to all get 100k+ votes and now we struggle to even hit 30k, it's sad to watch. Speaking of sad, you guys might think I'm bummed out Ramza lost. I was a little, but there are much cooler characters in Final Fantasy Tactics. Ramza stops being interesting some time in chapter 3 when he stops being a naive kid. He pulls a Freya from FF9 and just starts kind of being there. If this match involved Delita, Orlandu, Wiegraf, Agrias, Rafalak, or even Zalbag, Mustadio, Reis, or Elmdor, I would have been sad. Ramza? Boring. Lastly, I cannot cover this match without commenting on the obvious. This was as Pyrrhic a victory as it gets, and Mass Effect is done on our web site. I'll get into this more when I cover Shepard later, but good hell. This match never should have been close, and it wouldn't have been if Electronic Arts wasn't among the absolute worst companies in the history of this planet. I could make a very real argument that EA is more morally corrupt than Monsanto or Apple, and those companies kill people to stay ahead of the game. Look up Monsanto suing independent farmers or Apple's suicide nets in China some time. EA is on that level, and if you only stick to video games instead of geopolitics at large they are easily the worst company to ever happen in gaming. Only Blizzard is comparable. Lightning_Strikes's Analysis What happened?: The first true nailbiter of the contest. This was generally expected to be Garrus's match, he would win relatively comfortable based on 2013 and Ramza has never been especially strong. Then it started and was neck and neck, with multiple lead changes in the first two hours. This continued throughout the night with both contestants unable to get over a 100 vote lead. Ramza eventually pushed away a little bit, getting over 200 votes which he held for a couple of hours. Things quickly went back to back and forth though, until Garrus finally gained a consistent lead with the day vote. Ramza started to cut again in the last hour but by then it was too late. In the end this match had the smallest peak lead of any character battle match at just 419 votes, and will definitely go down as one of the most exciting ones this contest. What could this mean?: Poor Ramza. His record is as bad as Cecil's, but he has had fewer winnable matches. He at least kept this match much, much closer than most people here expected. I think a lot of this has to do with the fortunes of Mass Effect. That series has died an absolute death over the last several years, since Andromeda in particular, and I think all Mass Effect characters, even the ones people like, are going to suffer. There is still a poor taste in people's mouths from Andromeda without a doubt. Brace yourselves for an uninspiring Shepard performance. Safer777's Analysis This match was debatable before the contest. And just see the result. Great match for the fist time in this contest. We had lead changes, Ramza winning for 12 hours, then Garrus coming back and taking the lead, Ramza trying to catch up and all drama with the close matches. Anyways good match. One of the closest wire to wire matches I believe. Garrus is from Mass Effect and Ramza is from FFT. ME has fallen and Andromeda hurt the ME name even further and as for Ramza I feel sorry for him actually. FFT is an AWESOME game! And oh yeah ANOTHER FF main character didn't advanced! Still awesome match. Nobody can deny that. The prediction percentage was in the middle too. But Garrus was the heavy Guru favorite strangely enough. Over 86%! Don't know why. Guess people thought that ME series would be still good? Did people forgot Andromeda? Yeah it hasn't anything to do with the original trilogy but it doesn't matter! Tsunami's Analysis Our first match in which the users and the anonymous voters disagreed. In this case, the registered voters favored Ramza, but Garrus won the anonymous voters handily enough to overcome the registered user bonus. Also, it was an exciting match for quite some time. Garrus led at the freeze, Ramza took his first lead on the second update, Garrus had it again after the third by one vote, and then Ramza took the lead on the fourth update and started building. Or trying to; Garrus had the lead for four updates in the second hour as well and only three were consecutive. Ramza would eventually max out his lead at 256 at 1:10 AM before Garrus began cutting, but Ramza would not give up his lead easily. Here are the updates from the 5-6 AM hour. Ramza leads by 18 Ramza leads by 23 Ramza leads by 6 Garrus leads by 3 Tie Garrus leads by 7 Ramza leads by 3 Tie Ramza leads by 3 Ramza leads by 3 Ramza leads by 9 Ramza leads by 10 Ramza leads by 13 Garrus would retake the lead at 6:55 AM, and after Ramza took it right back on the next update, Garrus took the lead for good at 7:05. It took only 4.5 hours for him to build that lead above 300, and it never dropped below 300 over the remaining 8 hours and 25 minutes, but also never grew higher than 419 (a little over an hour from the end of the match). It just sort of went into stasis again. I suppose it was kind of even for most of the match, which meant that Garrus going from trailing at 7 AM to up by 301 at 11:35 was enough to put the match away. Ramza has never won a match either, but he's not from a main series game like Cecil so we expect less of him. He barely beat out Laharl for third place in that Hogger match. Why do we keep nominating this guy? Also he has roughly the same hairstyle as Guybrush, who also has never won a match. Though in this year's match pic he just plain looked like a girl instead of a guy with a girl's hairstyle. Apparently FFT got some new port that gave him better pictures? (Post-script: I have been informed that he was also in a Dissidia game. Does this mean that there are now at least three of those, or was he actually in one of the first two, something which I was explicitly certain was not the case? Either way that's sad. Upon researching the matter, I have found that there are now four Dissidia games and the fourth one, the only one that Ramza is in, is a mobile game. Excuse me while I experiment how far I can stick my finger down my throat.) Category:2018 Contest Matches